Wimsey drives the point home ruthlessly, stating baldly that he is “not stupid. My wife won’t have that to complain of” (177). Gilda is shocked by the notion that Wimsey regards stupidity as a sin as great as infidelity, but Peter is unsympathetic: “The one can cause quite as much upheaval as the other, and the trouble is that it’s incurable. One of those things one has to put up with. I shan’t necessarily be unfaithful to my wife, but I shall know enough about infidelity to know it when I see it, and not mistake other things for it” (177). Having at last made Gilda Farren understand the position, Peter knows that the worst thing she can do is to absolve her husband. It would be better to battle it out and earn mutual respect. Indeed, Peter has already warned her not to forgive Farren when he returns. “Forgiveness is the one unpardonable sin” (176). Of course the warning will fall on deaf ears. Hugh Farren will come back to his wife’s serene composure, the superior virtue that she claims with every action, every breath, and every absolution. Wings clipped, he will never be a completely happy man again.
Peter Wimsey’s purpose in this conversation is simply to discover where Hugh Farren has gone. He is almost entirely the detective in this novel, virtually one-dimensional in his role as sleuth. It is this one discussion that suggests the inner turmoil that Sayers was preparing for Lord Peter. What was the key to a happy marriage? How does a person love without trying to possess the other? How does one balance the heart and the intellect? The reader gets the barest clue to Wimsey’s inner debate, following the path of his amazing examination of Gilda Farren. The reader can understand only too well why Peter Wimsey’s ideal woman, Harriet Vane, is anything but stupid.
This was small stuff, considering what was at stake. As Dorothy L. Sayers continued to enlarge the saga of Peter Wimsey’s one great love, it became clear that he was determined to endure a long siege. She reunited Peter and Harriet to solve the murder of a gigolo in Have His Carcase, published in April 1932. The investigation proved successful, but Harriet was still too wounded to consider anything approaching romance. Sayers then determined to give the unhappy couple some breathing room, omitting Harriet almost completely from the next two novels. This left Peter to struggle with his emotional balance alone.
Sayers intended to address Lord Peter’s emotions, as well as her own, in the next Wimsey story. This was to be a novel like no other in the series, cut off from the familiar haunts of London and separated from the community of supporting characters so integral to Wimsey’s cases. Though Charles Parker would appear, lending a very bland and work-manlike assistance to the investigation, Wimsey and his man, Bunter, would go this one on their own. They were transported to another world, less than two hours from London but a century or more removed, spiritually and psychologically. In the treacherous, wild, scarcely populated Fens country of East Anglia, they would confront the memories of their creator.
This was no simple book to plan. Dorothy L. Sayers enlisted not only the recollections of her own childhood but the technical expertise of a range of interested experts. She needed to understand the myriad complexities of the long history of the Fens drainage, a haphazard and piecemeal example of human cooperation if ever there was one. She needed a church—not just any church of England but a centuries’ old abbey seat with a Norman foundation, an iron-fisted prelate of the fourteenth century, and a continuous history of architectural modification. Finally, she needed to know a great deal about bells—how to found them, how to ring them. Her imaginary Fenchurch St. Paul possessed a very fine ring of eight bells, the oldest dating back to 1338. The village population she envisioned would take great pride in the ring, devoting themselves to the arcane patterns of campanology with wonderful enthusiasm.53
An early notebook for this novel is largely devoted to the ringing of peals; page after page is simply filled with the characteristic plotted numbers. But the notebook further discloses some of the complications Sayers had to confront in construction. At one point, she wondered “if James [Thoday] finds & takes the money? This wd. account for his keeping so quiet about it all.” Even the names of characters became a challenge. The infamous Jeff Deacon began existence as Walter Russell, with Russell eventually becoming the maiden name of his wife, Mary. William Thoday was originally to be Robert Thoday. Interestingly, at this early stage, Cranton, perhaps the most lovable of all Sayers’s rogues, was not even envisioned.54
Creating and mastering the complexities of this rural world took time and devotion, even more than Sayers had anticipated. She had to push in ahead another story, the rapidly written Murder Must Advertise, in order to meet contractual obligations. That completed, she turned to complete her labor of love, the story of the bells that killed a brutal thief and murderer.55
Sayers placed her imaginary village of Fenchurch St. Paul firmly within the bounds of England’s Fens country, north of Cambridge. Though all the places she alludes to in The Nine Tailors are fictional, several bear close affinity to the real geography of the region. There is neither a Wal-beach nor a Holport in the Fens, but there is a village of Holbeach, scant miles from the sea. No Thirty Foot Drain exists, but the Sixteen Foot Drain originates less than twenty miles from Bluntisham, where Sayers grew up. She was, in fact, molding a most familiar country to her own vision and purposes. The recreation was no mere convenience but rather a deliberate attempt to paint an idealized landscape of her youth. In large part, this new story was to be a vehicle to ponder another of the emotional burdens laid upon her in 1929 and 1930. If Strong Poison reflects Dorothy L. Sayers’s disappointments in love and marriage, The Nine Tailors confronts her great sorrow at the loss of her parents. Among the residents of her tiny Fens village were the Reverend and Mrs. Venables, the devoted and absent-minded High Church cleric and his loving, if far more practical, spouse. These were Sayers’s own parents, brought lovingly to life one last time. And, across the way, there lived fifteen-year-old Hilary Thorpe, an awkward girl who would “make a splash” (91) one day. Sayers had placed her own adolescent self in the novel.
The Reverend Theodore Venables is a wonderfully drawn character, a persuasive combination of forgetful impracticality, sincere moral rectitude, attentive responsibility, and childlike enthusiasm. He is the kind of man a person has to love or he will drive you insane. Even at his very advanced age, he is a whirlwind of activity, ferrying parishioners on vital errands, attending the sick, comforting the bereft, and burying the dead. The good reverend putters from one obligation to the next in a fittingly ancient open motor car, blowing the horn at every crossing and every blind spot to warn others of their danger. He and his wife live in threadbare poverty, in part because they have put out so much to help the community, in part because he advances money to members of his flock that they might pay their tithes. If there are sins on his soul, they are negligible—an obvious pride in his church and an overweening passion for the practice of bell ringing. Reverend Venables, like the father of Dorothy L. Sayers, is a decent, God-fearing, unworldly man.
Sayers’s mother patiently bore a great deal living with her husband. Though she felt that he had wearied her for years beyond count with his cloistered ways, she missed him painfully when he was gone. They were a true couple, far more intertwined with one another than either could recognize. So it is with Theodore Venables and his wife, Agnes. God knows she suffered. The Reverend could seldom remember where he put anything or when he said anything. With his hectic, unheeding surrender to life as a series of dimly recognized but immediate obligations, there can be no schedule. Meal times come at any hour of the day and sometimes are foregone altogether without warning. Naturally, Agnes Venables finds this distressing; her husband is no longer young. More often than not, she can only bow to the inevitable, doing her best to manage the Reverend’s somewhat random approach to life.
Yet Mrs. Venables is a force in her own right. More judgmental than her husband, she is also more politic. She can see the good and bad in people, can size up their character more effectually. This makes her an invaluable pe
acemaker in the parish and a guiding force in community affairs. If some practical project is afoot to improve village life, Agnes Venables will invariably be found at the bottom of it. She and Theodore are a team, he looking after the spiritual wants of Fenchurch St. Paul, she ministering to the village’s material needs.
The story of The Nine Tailors is founded on the fabric of the Venables’s lives and values. Fenchurch St. Paul is a village isolated from the hustle of the modern world by more than custom and geography. Situated in the Fens country, the village lives in constant danger of flood; the Reverend carefully tracks the changes being made to the drainage system, preparing his flock for the worst. Fenchurch St. Paul is tiny in the scheme of things and must look after itself. Moreover, the village is far removed from city life, little affected by modern convenience and invention. These are mostly people who have never heard live jazz music. But the village is more than a quaint rural outpost stranded in the nineteenth century. It is, for all its bickering neighbors, its complicated and snooty class conventions, and its inbred marriages really a decent, moral community. The presence of the Reverend Venables and his wife make it so. They make an honest difference in the lives of three hundred forty Christian souls. Dorothy L. Sayers has painted an idyll in homage to the values of her parents.
At the same time, Sayers recognizes that she does not belong to this community, that her life will not conform to the idyll. Recalling herself through the character of fifteen-year-old Hilary Thorpe, she is one who loves the village and its people, who is the picture of responsibility and respect for her elders, and who cannot be contained in this tiny enclave. Oxford, notoriety, and the wide world beckon. Hilary’s father sincerely wishes there was more money to secure her future, but she is not worried. She will make her own way in the world, as a writer. This surprises her father:
“Oh? What are you going to write? Poetry?”
“Well, perhaps. But I don’t suppose that pays very well. I’ll write novels. Best-sellers. The sort that everybody goes potty over. Not just bosh ones, but like The Constant Nymph.”
“You’ll want a bit of experience before you can write novels, old girl.”
“Rot, Daddy. You don’t want experience for writing novels. People write them at Oxford and they sell like billy-ho. All about how awful everything was at school.” (59)
One can easily picture a fifteen-year-old Dorothy L. Sayers having this conversation with her father.
For Hilary Thorpe, Fenchurch St. Paul is a chrysalis, a warm and encompassing home where she will grow her wings and someday soon fly away. Yet, for all its warmth, the village has its troubles, and Hilary comes in for more than her share. Like her creator later in life, young Hilary loses both her parents in a few short months—her mother to influenza, her father to ill health stemming from personal disaster followed by service in the war. It is a sad loss for the community; the Thorpe family, descended from the minor nobility, had long supported and guided the town’s fortunes. Now little remains but broken fortunes, heavily mortgaged properties, and a child with dreams. Shadows of the unfortunate recent past rest heavily on the Thorpe family. The theft of the Wilbraham emeralds on the occasion of the marriage of Hilary’s parents remains an object of speculation sixteen years later. This misfortune is at the heart of the intricate mystery that Dorothy L. Sayers has in store. The mystery becomes manifest when the Thorpe family grave is opened to reveal a strange, unwanted, unidentifiable body.
From the first, it is plain that the Thorpe family tragedy is intimately connected to the mystery of the man in the grave. Exactly who had been involved in the theft, and in what capacity, is anyone’s guess. So is the location of the emeralds; they were never recovered. The robbery had broken the Thorpes. One of the thieves was Jeff Deacon, a trusted family retainer; his wife Mary, a local woman, may have been involved as well. Hilary’s father paid Mrs. Wilbraham the full value of the emeralds, leaving his family in straitened circumstances.
The dark cloud emanating from the incident persisted through the years. People remembered, speculated, and whispered. Still, it was the past, painful in its memories and its effects but dead and gone. Authorities reported Jeff Deacon, the servant turned thief, dead following an attempted jailbreak in 1918. His wife remarried and returned to live in Fenchurch St. Paul as Mrs. William Thoday. The parish felt the effects of the crime; they could no longer rely on the kindness and authority of the Thorpe family in times of crisis. But life continued restlessly on, for sixteen years.
The past returned to life in the new year of 1930. Like all shadow worlds, it was difficult to discern—a dropped cryptogram here, a brief intrusion by a seedy London ex-convict there, and a mentally impaired young man witnesses a confrontation in the church that he cannot properly describe or comprehend. The village, gripped by an epidemic of influenza, scarcely notices before returning to its somnolent pace. Then comes spring and the exposure of the unknown body in Hilary’s mother’s grave.
The discovery brings the modern era to the village in the person of Peter Wimsey. Quite by accident, Peter had stayed one night in the village on New Year’s Eve. He was a supplicant then, in need of shelter and aid following a motor crash. The village, and especially the Reverend Venables, took him in on their terms. He attended New Year’s Eve services (making embarrassing mistakes), took part in nine continuous hours of bell ringing, shared a community breakfast at the rectory, and had his car refurbished by a blacksmith. The Reverend and Mrs. Venables did not even recognize him as the famous London detective. When Peter returns in April, invited by the Reverend in the hope of solving the mystery of the grave, he is demonstrably different—a powerful and foreign presence in the village.
The difference is clear at the outset. Arriving just in time for the inquest, Peter is visibly gratified by horrid details of the corpse that the villagers can only find shocking. He plunges immediately into the investigation, cooperating fully with the local authorities but rapidly outdistancing their plodding ways. It is Wimsey who seizes on the significance of the rope that had bound the corpse, Wimsey who unearths a letter from the dead man’s wife following an intuitive long shot, and Wimsey who thinks nothing of running over to France to further the inquiry. His is a world of Daimler automobiles, scientific methodologies, and confrontations with news reporters. And it is a large, international world.
Fenchurch St. Paul does its best to go peaceably on. The Venables give Peter a room at the rectory for his investigations, save “on Clothing-Club nights, when I am afraid we shall have to turn you out” (128). It is planting time; farmers must be questioned at the convenience of their demanding work schedules. The two innkeepers are willing enough to talk, but only after they have sold Wimsey a beer. Theodore and Agnes Venables always seem to be caught on the fly; their responsibilities are an endless and unpredictable routine. The rhythms of the village are as always. The church bells—nine tailors for a man, six for a woman—mark the passage of time and mortal flesh.
The village influences Peter in subtle ways, largely for the good. He had failed to win Harriet Vane only three months before (though Sayers does not mention this in The Nine Tailors); his mood would be subdued in any case. Yet the presence of this massive and ancient church, this gentle and ancient padre, and this respectful and accepting village folk rob him of his usual careless air. There is essentially no blither in this novel. Peter’s touches of humor are attuned to his surroundings, gracious and light. For the greater part, he is simply determined to get on with the job. A gentlemanly and efficient approach is ordained.56
For all his ordered method and modern hustle, Peter is stymied until two of the villagers lend assistance. In each case, the aid is accidental, a shot in the dark. Hilary Thorpe sends Peter an odd message picked up in the church belfry; he instantly recognizes the piece to be in code. The Reverend Venables suggests that Peter’s ordered rearrangement of the cryptogram looks like a ringer’s peal; this provides the key to read the message. Even this is no immediate help, but Wimsey
eventually reads the thing rightly. All falls into place. Peter’s hypothetical understanding of the case has been completely in error. Now, a tragedy darker than even he had imagined looms.
The case, looked at as an abstract problem of identification, had seemed to hold such promise at the outset. Peter had been intrigued by the disclosure of mutilations done after death to conceal the body’s identity. A most cunning murderer seemed afoot. Then, as the weeks wore on, the components of the problem acquired names, faces, histories, and human lives. Starting out to solve a conundrum, Peter in the end faced the prospect of revealing a tragedy, resurrecting the past in shades of nightmare. Worse still, he could not even provide an absolute solution to the mystery. He knew who was dead, and why, but he could not say how the murder was done or who had done the killing. The shadow of suspicion and guilt would remain forever.
What Peter did was to find the emeralds. Everything fell into place when the green sparklers tumbled from their hiding place in the church. “We’ve been wrong from start to finish,” Peter admitted painfully. “Nobody found them. Nobody killed anybody for them. Nobody deciphered the cryptogram. We’re wrong, wrong, out of the hunt and wrong!” (207) All the mysterious business of letters from France, disguised visits by London crooks, codes and beer bottles in the belfry, and all the obfuscation of the dead past suddenly assumed a different hue. With the emeralds in his hand, there is just one possible answer. The unidentifiable body in the grave had to be Jeff Deacon, former servant to the Thorpes and convicted thief. He was finally dead, a dozen years after authorities had thought him so.
Conundrums for the Long Week-End Page 15
